[Xmltv-devel] Overlapping programs (fi_sv)

[Per Lundberg]

Hi guys,

Haven't been very active lately on my grabber but did a commit tonight
of some minor comment updates and similar. Anyway, I noticed that the
nightly report at
http://www.crustynet.org.uk/~xmltv-tester/squeeze/nightly/ gave some
warnings for the fi_sv grabber which isn't soooo nice. :-) So I
started looking into it a bit.

It turned out that the data is actually a little bit broken. If you
look at the web from where I am grabbing the data, more specifically
this page: http://svenska.yle.fi/programguide/?g=3&d=20101211, you
will see that the MTV3 listing for "Ostoskanava" (07:05-08:05)
overlaps some other programs. This is because Ostoskanava is probably
some kind of "childrens hour" or something like that. I've noticed at
other places that there have been similar things, but in these cases
the individual programs have been in the "program text" for the
program, which doesn't cause a problem for the grabber (but you could
argue that the behavior of the Ostoskanava is actually more convenient
if you think about recording programs etc...)

What is the "correct" way for a grabber to handle this? Should I
implement some kind of overlap check? How has this been handled in the
other grabbers?


Also, I really would like to have some form of "registry" of channels
which the individual grabbers support. Right now, I have at least 3-4
channels in my setup for which I have no current grabber. It could be
that at least one of them has an existing grabber. How would I find
out, without testing them all? :-)